News of Bucktown, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village and West Town
CHICAGO
JOURNAL
Volume 1, No. 17

Thursday, January 5, 2006
These days, Jane Wenger channels her artistic energy into realty
By LAURA PUTRE
Editor

Jane Wenger wasn’t called to be a Realtor; she was called to find a way not to have to pay rent. In the early 1970s, she was busy making a name for herself as an uncompromising photographer known for her abstracted nudes. She didn’t have a lot of money, but she had the foresight to borrow $21,000 from her family to buy a three story house with a yard facing Wicker Park. She rented two of the units and lived in one, and over the years the value of the place went through the roof. It faces the park, and the Blue Line rattles picturesquely past.

Eventually, not only did Wenger break even on her purchase-she made money as the rental income rose. Inspired, she considered buying another building but was naive about how to go about that. A Realtor friend, not being the teacherly type, was no help. “I ask “I decided I needed to take a class, and one of the classes that I ended up taking was one that lead toward getting a real estate license,” says Wenger, a everything and 61-year-old with pixieish white hair they say ‘What and a leonine bearing. “I wasn’t interested in getting my real estate license. is this? The
I just wanted to know stuff. But I took Inquisition?’,the exam and I passed the exam and I
thought, ‘Why shouldn’t I just get a real Jane Wenger estate license?’ Then I went to visit my Realtor friend in her office and she said why didn’t I hang my license there.”

It was the beginning of a new life’s work, and the ending of another. After showing in New York galleries and at Chicago’s Museum of ContemporaryArt, the epically inclined Wenger abruptly quit photography.

Wenger abandoned photography in 1985, declaring that she had gone as far as she could with the medium. To seal the deal, she bronzed her 35mm camera, calling the resulting piece her “Decisive Moment” in homage to Henri Cartier-Bresson.

It sits on a cabinet in her art-filled living room, amid shell, map, and skull collections, minimalist sculptures, and a handwritten vendor’s sign from the old Maxwell Street Market listing “Chester Drawers” as one of the items for sale.

Wenger has since reinvented herself as an independent real estate broker specializing in eclectic properties. “I really do only 12 or 13 deals a year, and I do them from as tiny as a $120,000 condo I did for a friend this year to quite, quite large,” she remarks offhandedly. “And I make a very good living doing it.” Her four “Rolodi” are stuffed with some 2,000 contacts. “I give good phone. I ask everybody everything and people say, ‘What is this, the Inquisition?’ But I learn everything about you, and I know what you need from it.”

She doesn’t rely on a computer much. “I had a Web page, which I still have, but it’s like, defunct. It’s like the record that’s broken and keeps going over the same thing. I don’t know how to change it and I don’t care. It’s not my way, and I don’t really need to do business that way.”

Wenger typically works with artists (and art-minded layfolk) who either find her through word of mouth or know her from the gallery scene. Just about every Friday night, she’s taking in art openings with a friend. “If you go to a party where there are a lot of interesting artists, you will usually find her there,” says Tim Samuelson, one of Wenger’s clients and the city’s cultural historian. “And she’s not there handing out business cards, she’s there because she’s interested in the art and the artists.”

She also knows firsthand the frustrations of finding suitable artists’ space. She bought her Wicker Park house during the doldrums of the 1970s “because I had to move from where I was living, and I had to have a darkroom and it either had to have running water or be right above the basement so I could plumb from the basement, and the landlord had to allow me to do it, and I have a dog,” so renting wasn’t going to cut it.

“Artists typically want the big open space,” Wenger elaborates as she sits at a salvaged marble-topped table in her sunny kitchen. “If they get a loft, they don’t want what people call lofts today, which are really soft lofts one big room with brick walls and three bedrooms and two baths.

“A lot of times they want a storefront with an apartment space above it. I can see what it can be, and I can give you ideas about it.”

She recently helped an inventor who builds giant globes and does “incendiary things for commercials” find live-work space on the northwest side. “He could make anything,” Wenger says. “That’s why I liked to work with him. What I found for him was a two-flat on a 75-foot-wide lot, and on the back was a dairy.” When she called the seller, she asked how big the dairy was, thinking it could be used as a studio. “He said, ‘I don’t know, you can tear it down.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no, you don t get it.’”

Such deals can get complex, if only because they involve self-employed people and atypical residential properties that banks aren’t used to dealing with. When Bridgeport gallery owners Jim Molnar and Koona Na wanted to buy a second property but had trouble getting a loan on their live-work space because it was considered commercial property, they contacted Wenger to sort it all out. “She’s got a lot of contacts at her fingertips,” Molnar says. “You could call 25 banks yourself and not find a single one that would do it.”

Sculptor Patrick McGee and his wife, Adelheide Mertz, knew Wenger from the art world and went to her when they were ready to buy in Humboldt Park. “She seemed like someone who understood what we would need to have studio space,” he enthuses. “Artists are picky and poor, and it takes them a while to find something they’re happy with and they’re not spending much money to begin with. We spent a lot of time with Jane. Other Realtors might say, ‘You know what? Forget it.’”

McGee recalls the time another agent tried to sell him a rental loft that turned out to be uninhabitable. “He said, ‘It’s great, it’ll be perfect for you.’ It ended up being 3,000 feet of raw space, unheated; there wasn’t a window in the place. And he drove in from the suburbs to show it to me.”

A self-described “tough cookie,” Wenger recently told a neighborhood developer, a man she was otherwise fond of, that she thought his latest bland, boxy concoction looked like crap. Apparently, he didn’t take it personally.

“I’m economically middle class, but in terms of my values, I’m not particularly middle class,” says Wenger. Her late mother, an interior designer in Long Island, used to enjoy hearing over the phone about the buildings her daughter had checked out. “I don’t think [having an aesthetic] scares people, I think that’s what entices people. I can see the space, I can see what it can be, and I can give you ideas about it. And I can also see when something’s more than you can handle. I’ll tell you ‘No.’ You might be thinking ‘yes,’ and I’ll say ‘this building’s going to bury you.’”

“On the other hand, I’ll also say ‘I think you should do this’ even when someone doesn’t want to do it. And that’s when people have to say, ‘No. Don t talk to me about it again.’ And then I’ll shut up.”

Samuelson once told Wenger no. He now calls this his “story of heartbreak.” About five years ago, Samuelson and his wife, artist Barbara Koenen, were looking for a place in Humboldt Park with studio space and room for a garden. “I can think of two or three properties she showed us that we didn’t act on, and we kicked ourselves later,” laments Samuelson. “It was always a case where the price seemed a little bit of a stretch for what we could do, and Jane told me ‘Believe me, it’s worth your trying for.’ If we would have bought then, we would have been in a good place now. It was a stretch to get them at the time, but it would be an impossibility to get them now.”